The Varieties of Non-Religious Experience

Some people find it incredible their otherwise intelligent friends believe in a God, a Virgin Birth or the Resurrection of Christ. Others find it incredible that their otherwise intelligent friends can deny the existence of a Creator and fail to see the Bible as divine revelation. In a new book called Atheism in Our Time (Macmillan; $5), Father Ignace Lepp, 53, who goes on the assumption that "neither belief nor unbelief can be adequately explained by bad faith," undertakes to define the varieties of modern unbelief.

Although he is now a Roman Catholic priest in Paris, Lepp has the credentials to explain the mind of the atheist: he was one himself for 27 years, and a Communist to boot. Born into a family of freethinkers, he joined the party at the age of 15 and unquestioningly assumed that religion was an enemy of social progress: "Since all my teachers were professed atheists, I considered myself to be one also." So long as he was striving for a Communist future, Lepp says, "I felt no need of God." He acquired degrees in medicine and philosophy (and even now, putting aside his cassock, practices psychotherapy). Lepp broke with the party after the Moscow trials of 1937, and eventually, a "metaphysical anxiety" drove him to question the meaning of life. In that psychological mood, he had his first encounter with the Christian message.

The new atheism, says Lepp, does not bother to debate with Christianity. It self-confidently proclaims the death of God and man's freedom from supernatural authority and seeks to build "a radically 'natural' civilization, without reference to any kind of transcendence." There are probably as many kinds of atheism as there are atheists, but Lepp's major classifications are:

sb NEUROTIC. Some modern atheists are unquestionably neurotics -- typically, the young idealist whose religious fervor turns into bitter anticlericalism after an unhappy experience in a seminary. Lepp has found that psychology can help cure such atheists of their emotional hostility toward religion, but will not affect their unbelief. "It is not in the psychologist's power either to give or to destroy faith," he warns. "This belongs to a metapsychical domain which the theologians call grace." Atheists by and large, he says, are not particularly neurotic.

sb MARXIST. Lepp stresses that unbelief is not a detachable corollary of Karl Marx's economic system, but logically follows from the Communist view that man must perfect himself and society by his own acts. To the true Marxist, belief in the existence of the supernatural is an "objective lie."

sb RATIONALIST. Lepp has considerably more respect and sympathy for the kind of atheism espoused by many modern scientists who deny the existence of God after making a reasoned study of the universe; he sees that "rational agnosticism is connatural to certain very positivistic forms of intelligence."

sb EXISTENTIAL. The atheism of French Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre sees God as merely a projection of the human psyche. Whether God exists or not, Sartre believes, changes nothing in the concrete condition of man. But Sartre "must be pained to see some of the results of his cogitations" in the put-on atheism of Left Bank beatniks.

sbSPIRITUAL. The atheism that most directly challenges Christianity deserts faith in God for what it believes to be higher spiritual values. To Friedrich Nietzsche, the Christian teaching that good men would receive their reward from God in an eternity of happiness in heaven tended to destroy man's will to power, and exalted the meek and humble losers of life instead of world-conquering supermen. Albert Camus searched Christian theology in vain for the fulfillment of man's fate, found more satisfactory standards in his own tragic ponderings on human responsibility and solidarity.

Lepp believes that the Christian understanding of God and his message has been considerably purified within the last century, thanks in large measure to criticisms leveled by atheists and agnostics. Intelligent Christians know, says Lepp, that the task of purification is in complete, and that the essential spiritual message of Christian revelation must be untangled from its past historical and social contexts. For it is only if Christianity is made relevant to the needs of the time "that fruitful dialogue can be established between believers and unbelievers, to the mutual benefit of each, and that the historical efficacy of Christianity can be safeguarded."

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